Rethinking Library Service to Distance Education Students: Analyzing the Embedded Librarian Model

Abstract

Since fall 2009, reference librarians at The George Washington University's Himmelfarb Health Sciences Library have been embedded in online classes through Blackboard within the School of Nursing and School of Medicine and Health Sciences. The authors sought to determine the types of questions asked of the librarian, with the goal of informing future interactions with distance education classes to help develop a standard "protocol" for working with this population of students. Eighty-two questions were categorized and qualitatively analyzed. The findings have prompted librarians to explore tools such as Elluminate Live!, a tool that allows librarians to provide synchronous instruction within the Blackboard environment.

Lessons learned from ten years of distance learning outreach

“…Still, there is evidence that medical libraries began using videoconferencing over the Internet from the time the technology emerged [2,3]. The use of co streaming (simultaneously webcasting classroom in struction in real time) [4,5]; embedded, scheduled, synchronous library education in the context of asynchronous online courses [6]; and desktop-sharing software to augment reference services provided by phone [7] indicate the novel ways that librarians have used real-time technologies to teach users. The videoconferencing intervention described here is unique because it reached new users, not existing ones, from populations who are underrepresented in the health professions [8].…”

Embedded Academic Librarianship: A Review of the Literature

“…Bennett and Simning (2010) conducted correlation and linear regression calculations to show a positive relationship between the number of librarian interactions in an online course (discussion board comments) and the number of reference transactions in an online-only university setting. Sullo et al (2012) evaluated 82 reference questions encountered from 16 nursing and health sciences online courses with an embedded librarian component gathered in an approximate 16 month period. More than a third of questions were general research guidance questions, while another 22% were related to citation management, followed by 20% related to identifying, locating or using a library resource.…”

Desafios para o bibliotecário universitário: MOOC, SIG e Humanidades Digitais como possibilidades da sua participação

“…La presencia del bibliotecario en el aula, a través de programas de Alfabetización Informacional no es nueva, bien de manera más indirecta, mediante servicios de soporte a la docencia o de su propia presencia en entornos distribuidos de aprendizaje, como son los Learning Management Systems (LMS), como Moodle o Blackboard, en el que su labor trasciende al de referencista, ya que en ocasiones puede formar parte del equipo docente de la asignatura (SULLO, et al, 2012).…”